Gandhi’s Unequal Justice in South Africa

The young lawyer fought the British empire for the rights of Indians, but not those of the Zulus he lived among.

November 19, 2015

Mahatma Gandhi as a law student, 1887Henry Guttmann / Getty

Gandhi was 24 years old when he arrived in Natal,
South Africa in May 1893, the month in which white settlers celebrated the 50th
anniversary of Natal’s annexation by the British Crown. Gandhi was called to
the Bar in June 1891 and was struggling to establish a law practice in Bombay
when the firm of Dada Abdulla & Co., offered him a year-long contract to
assist in a legal matter on the southern tip of Africa. Gandhi took up the
offer consisting of a first class passage to Natal, living expenses and a fee
of £105. When Gandhi landed at Port Natal there were roughly as many Indians as
whites in the colony. Natal’s population was pegged at 584,326 in 1893. Whites
numbered 45,707 (8 percent) and Indians 35,411 (6 percent). Zulus made up
almost 85 percent of the population.

Central to the imperial project in this part of the
British Empire was the subjugation of the Zulu. The Zulu kingdom rose to power
during the reign of Shaka (1816–28) and his brother Dingane (1828–40),
consolidated under their brother Mpande (1840–72), and collapsed during the
reign of Mpande’s son, Cetshwayo (1872–84). The British contrived ways to
separate Europeans from Africans. Administratively, they divided the colony of
Natal from Mpande’s Zulu kingdom along the Thukela River in 1843 while tracts
of land were granted to amakhosi (chiefs) in Natal who lived relatively
autonomous lives in these reserves. The aim of this “ethnic transfer” was to
separate white from black in order to achieve settler hegemony.

The
discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in the late 1870s required a stable
environment for white economic exploitation. British officials felt that some
Zulu chiefs were becoming too independent and Sir Bartle Frere, British High
Commissioner for South Africa from March 1877 onwards, set out to annex the
Zulu kingdom. He found a pretext to declare war in 1879. The Zulus won the
Battle of Isandlwana against the then greatest military power in the world but
eventually succumbed. Cetshwayo was exiled to the Cape but Queen Victoria
subsequently gave him permission to rule a portion of his former kingdom in the
hope that he would restore order. Cetshwayo’s son Dinuzulu was proclaimed king
when Cetshwayo died in 1884 but this position was largely ceremonial. With the
power of the Zulu kingdom eroded, the pace of land dispossession by both
British and Boer accelerated.

This is the canvas against which the arrival of
Indians in Natal from 1860 must be viewed. The Indian population included indentured
workers, “passenger” migrants who arrived at their own expense, and
“time-expired” Indians who had completed their contracts of indenture and made
Natal “home.” Larger wholesale traders like Dada Abdulla, who brought Gandhi to
Natal, and smaller dukawallahs and hawkers, many of whom had just
completed their indentures, were spread out across the city and countryside of
Natal. A steady trickle of Indians followed the discovery of diamonds to
Kimberley in the 1870s and then in the 1880s the gold rush into the Transvaal.

This dispersal of Indians across the colony, their
trespassing into white trading and residential monopolies, and their ability to
undercut prices and offer credit to white and black customers alike, raised the
ire of many settlers. Harry Escombe, future Prime Minister of Natal, told the
Wragg Commission of 1885–87 which had been established to investigate alleged
abuses in the system of indenture, that the presence of Indian traders
“entailed a competition which was simply impossible as far as Europeans were
concerned, on account of the different habits of life.”

Gandhi felt the weight of white power virtually
upon his arrival in the colony. Within days of landing in Natal, the magistrate
asked Gandhi to remove his turban when he went to court with Dada Abdulla.
Gandhi refused and stormed out of the courtroom. Barely two weeks later, Gandhi
was thrown off a first-class train compartment at Pietermaritzburg on the night
of June 7, 1893 when a white passenger protested against sharing the carriage
with a “coolie.”

Mahatma Gandhi as a young lawyer, c. 1906.Hulton Archive / Getty

Gandhi returned to India in July 1896 to publicize
the Indian plight in Natal and to bring back his family. At a speech in Bombay,
Gandhi stated that whites in Natal desired to “degrade us to the level of the
raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a
certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and then, pass his life in
indolence and nakedness.”

This was a theme that would run through much of
Gandhi’s life in South Africa. India occupied a privileged position in the
hierarchy of British imperial possessions. There was a feeling among some
British colonial officials that Indians were positioned higher up the chain of
civilization than Africans as they originated from the same Aryan root. The
managers of the Empire’s jewel were keen to avoid events in other parts of the
British globe offending or, worse, inflaming, national feeling on the
subcontinent. In geopolitical terms, Indians in South Africa counted far more
than the Zulu, a sense that Gandhi was keen to tap into.

Gandhi was also partial to the idea of Indo-Aryan
bloodlines. The Black African stood outside and below these civilized
standards. This echoed a broader global context in which race had become a
dominant theme in Western intellectual life in the nineteenth century, emphasizing
a scientific understanding of race that focused on biological differences.
European industrial progress and the conquest of black peoples were seen as the
empirical evidence of racial science which offered Europeans a clear validation
of their superior place in the world. Many works of the time believed Africans
were less aesthetically appealing than Europeans, even ugly, barbaric and less
intelligent.

The Gandhian vision sought to embrace diasporic
Indians and claim affinity with Europeans as (civilized) Aryans and imperial
citizens. This vision was conspicuous in its exclusion of Africans. Gandhi’s
newspaper Indian Opinion, for example, had little to say about Africans.
“Gandhi had neighbors like John Dube with whom he wanted little to do,” writes
Isabel Hofmeyr, in her book Gandhi’s
Printing Press. While Phoenix, where Gandhi opened a settlement in
1904, was in close proximity to Dube’s Ohlange Institute, “the leaders of these
two remarkable communities kept their distance and met rarely. ... Both expounded
different versions of ‘race pride’ with Dube involved in redeeming ‘Africa’ and
Gandhi in nurturing ‘India.’”

During his years in South Africa, Gandhi sought to ingratiate himself with Empire and its mission.

During his years in South Africa, Gandhi sought to
ingratiate himself with Empire and its mission. In doing so, he not only
rendered African exploitation and oppression invisible, but was, on occasion, a
willing part of their subjugation and racist stereotyping. This is not the
Gandhi spoken of in hagiographic speeches by politicians more than a century later.
This is a different man picking his way through the dross of his time; not just
any time, but the height of colonialism; not through any country, but a land
that was witness to three centuries of unremitting conquest, brutality and
racial bloodletting.

Over the decades the complexities, ironies and
blemishes of Gandhi’s South African years have been smothered to serve the
political expediencies of the day. Commemorating Gandhi is part of a vigorous
debate in post-apartheid South Africa about “history and heritage, ‘truth’ and ‘lies,’ and memory and make-believe.” The cultural historian
Annie Coombes asks us to consider seriously how best to represent national
history through cultural institutions and monuments because elites tend to invent
stories and historical figures which are seen as the glue to reconcile
competing interests in transforming societies. While Coombes calls
for an understanding of South Africa’s past that goes beyond a simple binary
between apartheid and resistance, Gandhi has been reinvented as an icon of
non-racialism and as one of the foremost fighters against segregation.

While a corpus of critical work on Gandhi has
emerged over the years, individually, these works have done little to dent the
overwhelming storyline of his heroism—of an individual who slowly but
inexorably transformed into a Mahatma by the time he left the shores of South
Africa in 1914.